


Sweetness in Suffering

by Anastasie Elise (IzzyBells)



Series: These Vampires Are Technically Antiques [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Clarity is dramatic and tired and that's her right, Discussion of Rape, F/M, Religious Discussion, Vampires, discussion of miscarriage, time to talk about trauma after 250 years, vampires hunting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-14 16:48:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28798629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IzzyBells/pseuds/Anastasie%20Elise
Summary: “How young do you think they are?” she asked, voice soft, indicating with the slightest of nods the family across the lobby of the theater.Seth looked first to her, then to the figures she had pointed out. He guessed at the ages of the girls, estimated the ages of the parents.
Relationships: Clarity & Seth, Clarity/Seth, Original Female Character/Original Male Character
Series: These Vampires Are Technically Antiques [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2055990
Kudos: 1





	Sweetness in Suffering

**Author's Note:**

> Clarity explaining to Seth her life before she became a vampire. eventually i'll finish their full story. written in 2019

It was Seth who had a mind for politics and culture in a way Clarity could never fathom, since the very beginning. All those years ago, in that Boston flat, when he tried to explain to her the nuances of his revolution, she had never been able to grasp the righteous passion in the logical philosophy. No, in those days she dwelled within the boundaries of her own life, existing in moments with a radius only of what she could sense. Even now, she didn’t enjoy planning far into the future or considering global events that would never touch her. Perhaps that was why she felt no great desire for adventure abroad the way he did. He was the one who owned property and spent real time in Europe, Asia, South America—she knew he had his eye on extending his scope to the western coast of Africa, too—and Clarity only vacationed at rented properties in lovely locales. It was the people she loved, the touch of mortal individuality that she found wherever she looked. That was plenty for her.

She didn’t have his taste for luxury, either. They both had come from next to nothing, but that gave Clarity a certain discomfort for excess, while Seth seemed determined to provide for himself all that he couldn’t have dreamed of centuries ago. She supposed he was well within his rights to it, at least—he had gone to a prestigious university back when tuition was still cheap, and he earned a liberal arts degree before going on to build for himself an impressive career in international journalism. It lasted as long as he could make it last before going underground again, and when he returned to the scene a decade later with a pseudonym and a freelance deal, he grew his wealth even more. Of course, that wasn’t to say that Clarity denied herself anything; by trusting bankers across the decades to set up clever accounts and wise investments, she too had a pot of gold at her disposal. The difference was that she didn’t desire extravagance for extravagance’s sake, only comfort and options.

He could have his houses in the exotic places abroad, and Clarity was free to visit any of them if she wished, but she preferred to keep to her familiar properties in her familiar North America. It was home she wanted. There was her house in Boston, old and full of the most grandeur of all her properties, decorated in the neoclassical style of America’s Golden Age, containing her museum of collected keepsakes, outdated favorite dresses, and her only coffin. She had a townhouse in Chicago, her favorite city outside of Boston itself, where she grew a garden of houseplants, kept a mortal to tend them, and usually stayed for years at a time. After the Civil War she had bought her little cottage on the coast of Maine, the first place she moved to outside of Massachusetts, a beautiful spot for when she wanted a break from the urban lifestyle. Up in Canada, she built a cabin in the wilderness, a place to fall out of society for a little while where she could forget the world outside of herself, surrounded by creatures more feral than she was. None were particularly large, but none were lacking in modern comforts (the only exception, of course, was the cabin, which ran on stinking, but not unhealthy, well water, though she thankfully only needed to use it occasionally when washing). This was all she felt necessary, providing her with options enough to bounce between in accordance with her own boredom or the demand of mortal suspicion. She enjoyed an almost anonymous identity everywhere she went, posing as an Airbnb guest in her own properties or blending in as a face among city faces.

Clarity felt little need for occupation, either, besides the light employment she sought out for her own pleasure as a bartender in either Boston or Chicago. She had taken up hobbies over the years: needlepoint, pottery, painting; but mostly she read. There was a wealth of literature available to her in this world, and she wanted to absorb the mythology, biographies, poetry, fiction novels, religion, philosophy of human nature and the order of the universe rather than philosophy of politics or economy. She liked to sit in bookstores, coffeeshops, museums, and bars, looking and watching the people, trying to extract from their presentation and behavior what they thought of the world and what they believed—thanks to the strongest modern sunscreens, this was even possible for an hour or two in the morning and evening. The mysteries of God were an endless puzzle for her, and she both craved and scorned the dogmatic system of beliefs she had been born into centuries ago. Most of all, she tried to picture their lives as humans with the press of time at their backs, the way they worked in deadlines and urgency. “YOLO” was fascinating to her from the moment she heard it at work one night years ago, the acknowledgement of a limited lifetime that could be squandered or used to the fullest. She had no sense of that anymore, not with eternity stretching before her.

“How young do you think they are?” she asked, voice soft, indicating with the slightest of nods the family across the lobby of the theater.

Seth looked first to her, then to the figures she had pointed out. A family of five, two parents and three little daughters, stood in line for the merchandise counter, eagerly looking ahead at the overpriced items emblazoned with the Sound of Music logo. He handed a Playbill book to Clarity silently, taking a moment to study the family before offering an answer. Finally, he shrugged. He guessed at the ages of the girls, estimated the ages of the parents.

“The wife is older than her husband,” Clarity whispered. “You can see it in the way her eyes crinkle, and her movements come slower, a little more stiffly. Her husband is all energy for his ladies, and his hair is not yet starting to gray. I put them five years apart. Having children exhausted her, but she loves that her husband wanted children, and after her first daughter was born, she wanted to feel that miracle again. Those girls, they’re all under the age of ten, at least, and perhaps only a year or two apart from each other. If not for the risks that come with age, she might have had more.”

In her periphery, Clarity saw Seth’s lips turn down. He was confused, but disinterestedly. He’d rather they go find their seats to watch the Broadway show he had bought them tickets for, she knew. Perhaps later when they were back in his home, he’d ask her about it, or maybe he would forget. The musical cheered her, seeing the costumes in the style before the Second World War and hearing the beloved melodies, but she could tell she would be in one of her melancholy moods after it was over. 

They hunted as they walked back to Seth’s building. They separated for their kills, and Clarity fixed her posture and pace to mimic a target, stepping down quiet streets past groups of men. She could always count on piggish men, and sure enough, she freed the world of one more rapist that evening. Seth was still wiping the blood from his mouth when she caught up with him. In silence, they entered the lobby of his complex and took the elevator up to his lavish penthouse. Such a long time they had known each other that they didn’t need to speak to enjoy each other’s company. In the guest room, she changed into lounge clothes, and he had settled down with his laptop to work when she reemerged. He was a blogger this time, focusing on film analysis of the latest foreign movies. She touched her hand to his shoulder as she stepped past him to stand at the window, looking out over the nighttime lights of New York City.

“You’re brooding,” he stated after perhaps an hour or more had passed.

Clarity let out a snort of bitter amusement. “Brooding,” she repeated. “What irony in your wording.”

“Irony?” His reflection in the window glass looked up from his screen to stare at her, brow pinched. “What irony is there in ‘brooding?’” After she gave no reply, he continued, “Is it that family? Are you referring to brood hens?”

He knew she had had a family and had been a mother in that little life before becoming a vampire. Over the years, moments like these had come before, always sparked by the image of some happy mortal family with three children. It wasn’t natural to her, talking about herself, so all he knew he had teased out of her bit by bit, question by question, and even then she had admitted to quite little in precise terms. Certainly Seth inferred quite a lot from her expressions and the situations that set her off. Hopefully he hadn’t guessed at her young crisis in those days before she met him; that was a dark and terrible time to think of, and she loathed to remember what a creature she had become in her grief and desolation. He was patient enough with her, maybe because these were the only times she was truly unpleasant. She was grateful that he cared about her state of mind.

There was his hand at her elbow, then around her waist. “Let’s sit down,” he suggested, and she followed. “You’re thinking about your family again,” he said.

Reclining on the plush sofa, she nodded. “I keep thinking about those little girls in the theater,” she told him, “how it would be to hold them and care for them.”

“I grow weary, dear,” he said, though it was all fondness in his tone. “Did you have daughters?”

“Two,” she answered. Let him figure out for himself that her third child was a son. She sat on that sofa, gray, with clean lines, in the contemporary fashion, and tried to remember her children’s faces. Indeed, this was not the first time that she found she could not. Of course, it was never her two daughters and son that mattered; it only mattered that they had been her children. 

Slowly, as if he had just been pondering something great, he said, “You said that woman probably had her second and third children to experience the miracle of birth again.” He paused. “You meant it, didn’t you? That it’s a miracle, I mean.”

“For some,” she said. “Really, birth is objectively a miracle. Science, yes, but the creation of life, the sparking of a soul, is a miracle. Not everyone experiences the miracle part of birth, though.”

Seth nodded. “Of course, I mean, I never could have understood even as a mortal—“

“Not just men,” she said, cutting him off sharply. “I didn’t experience any miracle whatsoever. It was suffering.”

“Why’d you have three children, then?”

She inspected her fingers and her nail beds pink with the night’s blood. “In those days, you didn’t have a choice.”

Puritan religion was strict, adhering to the Bible’s teachings to the letter and extending into government, effectively ruling every corner of Clarity’s formative society. That included marital relations, and both husband and wife—only husband and wife—were expected to fulfill the God-given marital duties. Clarity had known one case where a couple’s troubles in the bedroom led to a divorce, but for the most part, marital rape was common. She had been young, too young, and at first it had been exciting, making love to her husband, but after her difficult first pregnancy and birth, she had lost interest in men entirely. Children were expected, however, and so it went on. Her second child was born, no more easily than the last, and Clarity loathed the touch of her husband then, but she couldn’t ruin her children by allowing her husband to divorce her for refusing to have sex. Her miscarriage is what broke her; she could see that looking back on it. Years ago she had come to understand that. After the mourning of her lost child, there was nothing, and after her last child there was nothing, and then there was the vampire. She could not bear to put this into words to explain to Seth. It was enough to imply a culture of marital rape. (Yes, it had been that same misogynistic way in his own time, of course, but he had been too young and revolution-minded to heed anything of that sort.) She could not bear to explain how this formative influence affected her later, either, tearing her apart in vicious conflict between her life’s purpose and her freedom.

“Clarity, please talk to me,” he entreated, reaching out to touch her arm. “It’s been almost 250 years, and I just want to understand what’s going on in your head. You leave me assuming the worst every time we do this.”

“It is the worst,” she said, “and you’ll never look at me the same if I tell you.”

“How could I look at you any differently? I’ve known you all my life. Nothing could change what you are to me.”

Clarity brought her feet up on the couch, and she hugged her folded legs to her chest, resting her chin on her knees. This wasn’t about trust. She trusted Seth completely, and she knew he was as devoted to her now as he was all those years ago in the time even before she transformed him. If he said he would never look at her differently, he meant it. Rather, it was about protecting him. It was as if telling him the tragic story of her life and death before meeting him would ruin the goodness in him, and that she couldn’t risk. Maybe it was a foolish hangup; after all, he was by now well acquainted with the evils of the modern world, better even than she was. He was forged in an environment of oppression and injustice, and he fought those things every day in his writing, now across the world. Perhaps that was the problem: in this horror, there was no remedy to be had, no one to push back against, and she knew he would spin his wheels, unable to fix what was broken over 300 years ago.

“Please,” Seth said again, pleading. He sighed. “I know it’s painful for you, but let me share that pain and take some of the weight off your shoulders.”

She shook her head. “I’ve never told anyone the whole story,” she said. “I don’t even know how.”

He shifted closer to wrap his arm around her shoulders, pulling her into his side. “Alright,” he said, “alright. I’ll stop pushing it tonight.”

Three and a half months later saw Seth unloading his suitcases from the trunk of a rental car, a sleek black Jaguar sedan, blending in almost completely with the shadows of the nighttime forest foliage. Clarity stood on the porch of her cabin, ignoring the moths hovering around the lights. There were crickets and frogs and the breeze in the trees filling the night with their own orchestral performance, singing in stark contrast to the music she had heard him playing in his car on the mile-long driveway up to the cabin. He had visited before, of course, but not since she redecorated the interior a couple years ago. She had built the cabin in the 1960s, and though she kept the midcentury modern style to match the architecture, the furnishings and fixtures needed an update and a refreshed color palette every handful of years, not to mention a plumbing and electrical maintenance check, especially since she rented this property out through Airbnb when she wasn’t in residence herself. It was modest, but with a loft bedroom and open floor plan that made it feel spacious, and its location and quality allowed her to set a very decent rent price. It was not, however, the type of place Seth would choose for himself. He came because Clarity was there, but she knew any cabin in the woods he built for himself would be designed by famous architects and would probably have a heated infinity pool.

They hunted. She stalked deep into the woods with Seth behind her until they found a moose, alone and perfect for the taking. Darting forward, she was at its throat in an instant, snapping her teeth and clawing at the hide, trying to move into a position to lock onto the throat. Seth was there, stronger than her, and he tackled the beast, held it down. Clarity broke the jugular, drinking down hot blood until she had her fill and the moose stopped struggling. She moved away, and Seth finished off the rest. 

“Gamy,” he commented, gore smeared across his face from pressing against the moose’s throat.

“Hearty,” she countered, knowing her face was probably similarly smeared.

The exhilaration of taking down a wild animal was different than that of draining a human. For Clarity, human kills were sensual in their pleasure, like a hedonistic feast or ancient blood ritual. It drove her into a frenzy if she let it, relaxing her inhibitions and drugging her senses into sweet overdrive. Downing a moose, or a bear, wolf, or even a mountain lion was a different kind of release, as if she were becoming an animal herself, without higher reason, only the moral-less instinct of an apex predator. It was a different kind of buzz, one that made her want to spin around, climb a tree, run until the sun rose, bury herself in the cool earth like an ancient being, lose her sense of self and never find it again. 

Sitting in the living room, fire roaring in the hearth, Clarity thought over all the words she had been preparing. Seth was right, she should share with him her past just as he shared everything with her. He would appreciate her trust, and he would be better equipped to help her through those bouts of depression. It was just a lot to go through, so many painful experiences to recount and complicated emotions to explain. She had decided it would be best to start at the beginning.

“I was born in Massachusetts, to a small community of Puritans, in 1686. This you know.” Clarity saw him nod, and she continued. “I don’t know how much you know about Puritans and their way of life—“

“I read the Wikipedia page, and the encyclopedia entry before that. I took classes at university in early Protestant Christianity. There’ve been a handful of books over the years, and documentaries. All to try and understand you,” he said.

“Alright, so you know about it. You never lived it, though. You grew up in the Enlightenment, so you’ll never know what that deeply religious society was like.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, I was in Missouri for the Second Great Awakening. If that’s not a deeply religious society, I don’t know what is.”

“Different entirely,” Clarity dismissed. “Puritans weren’t emotionally driven the way those evangelical revivalists were. They—we, I suppose—followed the Bible to the word, concerned with intellectual theology. Actually, in those days, Puritan education was perhaps better than others for including women and girls. Everyone needed to read and write so that everyone could study the Bible for themselves, and all that. But a whole community made up of the same strong religion meant that religion was written into our government, and we believed the government should enforce all Biblical teachings as law, and we should live according to those teachings. So, witches happened, not in my town, but we knew about it, and it made sense to us at the time. The separation of church and state we have now is more of a blessing than you’ll ever know.

“Anyway, I was born to just a normal family. My parents kept dairy cows, and I was the eldest child of the five who lived past infancy. Our preacher had a few sons, and one of them started courting me. I remember that being quite fun. Part of Puritan law was concerned with extramarital intimacy, and it was scandalous to be alone together or even kiss, so of course there was a good deal of teenaged sneaking around. We married when I was fifteen, and he was—oh, I don’t know, older than me by a few years.”

“You were fifteen?” Seth repeated, shock in his tone.

“Well, yes,” Clarity answered. “You knew I had three children by the age of twenty; I told you that’s when I became a vampire.”

Seth frowned. “I—yeah, I just—I just didn’t, I don’t know, really think about how young you actually might’ve been. I always assumed you were, oh, eighteen, I suppose. Fifteen! That’s—that’s so young.”

“It was pretty common,” Clarity shrugged. “Especially with the whole you-can’t-have-sex-or-make-out-until-you’re-married thing. Plenty of times a girl would fall pregnant, there would be scandal, the baby’s father would marry her to prevent any real legal consequence. I had a friend once whose parents didn’t approve of her match to a boy she fell in love with, so they created a scandal to get married as a loophole around her parents’ consent. Really, if a girl wasn’t married or being courted by her 20s, she might as well be considered a spinster already.”

“That’s still so young,” Seth sighed. Then he shook his head. “I don’t know. My sister married at seventeen. I’ve been modern too long, I guess.”

“I guess,” Clarity nodded. 

He gestured with a hand. “Sorry, continue.”

“I married, I was fifteen, my new husband was going to be the next preacher after his father.” She sighed. “I was suddenly the wife of someone who mattered in society, someone who was supposed to be a paragon of Christian life, and I was put under more pressure than I expected to live up to that standard as his wife. I found out I was pregnant within a few months, and it was one of the most difficult experiences I’ve ever gone through in my life. It was a difficult pregnancy and a long birth, but my newborn daughter was healthy after it all. I wasn’t. I had a slow physical recovery, but even worse, I think, was my mental recovery. Today, people differentiate between baby blues and postpartum depression by duration and intensity of the emotional aftermath of pregnancy, and I’m positive I had postpartum depression. I can’t describe to you what it felt like anymore, but if it had happened now, I would’ve sought treatment.

“But this is now, and that was then, and back then I couldn’t be struggling. I should have at least told someone about what was going on, but I didn’t. My husband was impatient with me after I was physically healed, and of course it was expected that I become pregnant again in fairly short order. If he weren’t the preacher’s son, he could have divorced me for not performing my marital duties—yes, that was valid grounds for divorce under our laws—but that wasn’t our situation. I tolerated him finally, and I became pregnant a second time.

“My second pregnancy was just as bad as the first, but I was angrier. I remember fighting. Never shouting, because someone might hear, and never physical, because someone might notice bruises, but I have a vivid memory of sitting over the washtub and saying something terrible and violent as he sat at the table with his books, holding my daughter in his lap. I think he threatened to beat me in response, but I knew then he never would, and I still think he never could have brought himself to strike me. In any case, I had a son, and afterwards I despised my husband so much that I refused to speak to him at home. Now he understood the healing better, and he didn’t buy any excuse I gave him.” 

It always seemed so cruel to Clarity that she couldn’t cry anymore. She always remarked this curious side effect of being a vampire, even if only to herself, and sometimes she turned it over in her mind when there was nothing else to think about. No lumps formed in her throat to choke her words, no salt tears stung her eyes and blurred her vision, no delicate wet stains down her cheeks. They were the image of perfection, vampires, and Clarity supposed crying wasn’t pretty. Besides, what water was there to feed any tears? She only drank blood, only ate blood, and produced no waste. She didn’t sweat, her nose never ran, and she didn’t cry. Sometimes she salivated, but it always tasted of copper, like it was just old blood in her mouth, leaving its tang as an appetizer on her tongue. So, though her next words might have brought her to tears, she said them too smoothly. The dead don’t cry, after all.

“The first time he forced me down, I was too stunned to fight him off. The next time, I spat in his face and shoved against him until he fell to the floor. I’m sure there was more, but I can’t recall how many times it was before I found I was pregnant again. It started out difficult, but—but I miscarried in the second trimester.” She closed her eyes and squeezed her lids tight for a moment, pressing her lips together. “It was like I died with my baby. I don’t remember what its sex was. Maybe no one told me, or maybe it was too early along to even tell. I didn’t feel anything after that, not even when I looked at my children. My daughter was—she was two, almost three, and—and my son, he was only a year old. And then that thing I bore, too small to survive in the air, not even grown enough to be called a baby.

“I don’t remember much else, but I must have gotten pregnant again somehow, because I had a newborn again and I felt nothing. I don’t remember feeding her. I may have, or my husband may have had someone else do it for me. She wasn’t a year old yet, I don’t think, when I got up in the night and left my house to walk into the woods, and that was when the vampire killed my body,” Clarity concluded. 

Seth was nibbling at the cuticle around his nail when she looked up at him. There was a deep sadness in his expression, but it wasn’t aimed at her like pity. He was staring at nothing, sunk into his own thoughts, saddened as if it was his own story, too.

“You wanted it,” he whispered. In a blink, the focus came back to his eyes, and he met her gaze. “You were ready to go,” he said, louder.

She nodded and brushed her hair back behind an ear. “Any happy life I had was already gone—had been for a while,” she confirmed. “I’ve met many vampires and listened to the stories of any who’ll tell them, and it seems that all the best vampires, the ones who adjust properly and stay sane long enough to grow old, are so successful in their deaths because their lives would have ended around the time of their transformation anyway. They already lost their place among the living, so it was relatively easy to join the dead as their next stage of existence.” Then she added, “It’s never as easy as pie, of course, but there’s little grief about the lives they left behind, at least, and they never seem to struggle with that awful restlessness others feel.”

“Like me,” he nodded. “You never asked if I wanted it until I was already dying in that hospital.”

“Exactly. You had made your peace with death already.” Clarity smiled, a bittersweet thing. “So now you know how it happened,” she whispered.

It didn’t answer everything or explain it properly, she knew. Surely he had questions, perhaps more than he started with, but Clarity couldn’t keep talking about this. There was more he didn’t know: the self-loathing and despair that led her, eventually, to him, but he didn’t need to hear it; that was the part he almost certainly had figured out for himself a long time ago. She felt like her chest might cave in, so intense was the pain of her past. She wasn’t like Seth, whose story was heroic, going out fighting a revolution against tyranny, taken down by shrapnel to his back, given a second chance at life by his trusted lover and friend. Her story was purely tragic, all but begging for her death and given a curse instead.

He stayed at the cabin with her for two weeks before declaring he was sick of smelling like well water and promising to see her again whenever she liked. He never asked about her past again, and Clarity could almost forget that he even knew until something put her in one of her moods, and at those times he understood without even a word from her about it. It was nice. She was glad to have told the whole tale.


End file.
